In this first part of her interview with goCognitive, Dr. Marlene Behrmann of Carnegie Mellon University provides an overview of some central aspects of visual attention. She explains top-down and bottom-up (stimulus driven) forms of attention and then focuses on the difference between attention tied to a particular location in space (spatial attention) with attention tied to a particular object within a scene (object-based attention). In the two following parts of the interview she addresses two different types of "breakdowns" of visual processing for two kinds of patients - spatial hemineglect patients and prosopagnostics (face-blind patients). The interview was conducted at the studio of WQED in Pittsburgh by Cynthia Peng, an undergraduate student at CMU.